It comes as no surprise that the F-35 can’t dogfight, according to a recent test pilot’s report.
It comes as no surprise that the F-35 can’t dogfight, according to a recent test pilot’s report.
Posted in Technology, War | 12 Comments »
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Oh no, the brain slugs have gotten to you too!
Just kidding. Anyway, let me paste the response I’ve been posting elsewhere for this:
I’d add that we were sold the idea that the F-22 would handle air-superiority, while the F-35 would handle strike missions and play backup support for the F-22 against second- and third- tier opponents. Now that we’ve cancelled F-22 production, we’re stuck with the F-35 for pretty much everything, at least once the legacy aircraft wear out. Restarting F-22 production at this point would likely be as expensive as just starting from a blank sheet of paper, too.
The whole boondoggle is perfectly representative of the extreme dysfunction of the post-Cold War defense establishment.
It comes as no surprise that the F-35 can’t dogfight, because it wasn’t designed to be a dogfighter. Perhaps I should’ve spelled that out.
One should never have to apologize for the obliviousness of one’s guests.
Thinking that fifth generation combat aircraft will dog fight is as silly as spacecraft having manned ball turrets (yes I’m looking at you, Millennium Falcon). People should be lucky the F-35 still has at least pilots!
On a related note, did you know that the last battleships (USS Iowa and USS Wisconsin) were stricken from the Naval Registry back in 2006?
Hey, at least they were really good for shore bombardment. The Marines really miss the BBs, even if that capability wasn’t worth the cost of maintaining them anymore.
The F-35 will not be stealthy going into a target area, because it will have all sorts of ordnance slung under its wings. It will have a radar cross section similar to an F-16 and will be findable and targetable by the usual radars.
If it is going to attack a target that is heavily defended with modern radars and missiles, it will have to go in clean, which means it will be carrying much less ordnance internally. The number of aircraft required would be substantially larger.
It will be stealthy on the way out when its wings are clean. The missions will be successful if the F-35 can get away before the bad guys show up.
As to using long range AA missiles, the USAF ,abbr title=”Rules Of Engagement”>ROE almost always forbid that and require visual identification. The Army did shoot down at least one British aircraft in the second Gulf war using BVR Patriot missiles, and the Vincennes did shoot done a civilian air liner in the first Gulf war. Who knows what happened in Ukraine? So unless the USAF is absolutely certain no innocent aircraft are in range and all radar targets are bad guys, you won’t see any over the horizon shots.
The USAF usually emphasizes the F-35′s other attributes, like networking, which allows it to swap off targets to other members of the strike force and to share targeting information. Then there is an enhanced sensor suite and improved cockpit displays.
We will have to wait and if the designers have made the right tradeoffs.
I agree with pretty much all of the points you make, Bob. We honestly have no idea what sort of situation we’ll face going into another major conventional war, especially with regard to ROE and other issues that reside in the political penumbra of a conflict. Traditional US policy has been to lose the first few battles of most major wars we get into while learning (more usually, relearning) what works and what doesn’t. With everything so front-loaded these days, I’m not sure we can afford that kind of learning process anymore. We’ll just have to hope any potential opponents can afford it less.
As you say, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Scipio and Slovenian have it absolutely right. Dogfighting is as obsolete as sword-fighting. Imagine someone trying to criticize some new military rifle by saying, “Ha, that bayonet would be useless in a sword-fight, and most of the time they won’t even be attaching it! What a corrupt fiasco is this whole so-called ‘M-16′ project!”
There is so much completely irrational F-35 hate and A-10 love out there, especially online. That’s worth reflecting upon. It’s fascinating as a social phenomena, but, again, goes to show the absurdity of anything that relies on the assumption of the accuracy and reasonableness of public opinion.
The A-10 stuff is possibly even worse, in my opinion. We let it work like it was designed at the beginning of the first Gulf War, low-level strafing runs against enemy armor and battlefield interdiction strikes deep behind enemy lines. Result: in the first few weeks a bunch of them got shot down. After that they were pulled back to mid-level and fired Mavericks at the armor. Just as effective (if not more so) but it meant that the gun was nothing but dead weight. So it has remained, with the exception of shooting guys in pickup trucks. The proliferation of MANPADs may make even that too hazardous soon enough.
It can be so hard to explain to people that the gun has effectively been dead weight for more than 20 years, and that modern CAS consists primarily of dropping a smart-bomb or launching an AGM from 20,000 ft. up. Indeed, that’s the vast majority of what the A-10′s have been doing in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Scipio:
There are some other important CAS scenarios, but none of them can justify a 70-rps, 30-mm shell, anti-tank Gatling gun.
It’s already much better with regular rotary-wing aviation support, but that can be slow to get on station, and has a worse MANPAD risk.
I’d rather have an AC-130 gunship circling overhead, keeping the enemy port-side and landing area-clearing artillery on their position, to help me with that mission anyday.
The reason to keep the A-10 around is not the gun, as wonderful as the gun is, but because it’s dirt cheap to operate compared to every other aircraft in the fleet. There’s no point in sending a $30k/hour F-35 or $20k/hour F-15 if the $10k/hour hog will suffice.
The F-35 is about twice as expensive per flying hour as the A-10, though the A-10 is by all accounts a terrible hangar queen. No one knows how the F-35 will be on that account.
The real issues are:
1) The A-10 fleet is being maintained mostly through cannibalization of existing aircraft. There’s no further supply of spares.
2) For the particular role it’s good at, CAS in a permissive air environment, drones cost 2/3 less than the A-10 per flying hour and replicate most of the functionality.
3) The monetary, personnel, and time expense of maintaining the A-10 fleet as a whole very disproportionate to the unique capabilities it brings to the table.